2026-09-20 –, Kleiner Saal Language: English
Imagine a federated Discord alternative using a protocol where your access to the network survived outages of your own server!
polyproto is a new, in-development federation protocol aiming to make federation truly mainstream and to serve as the base for chat services making switching fully away from, for example, Discord, Matrix or XMPP finally viable.
Born out of dissatisfaction with the current world of message federation protocols, I want to pitch the why, elaborate on how it makes it easy to survive your home server sunsetting forever, and give an overview of not just how the protocol works, but also how I designed it so far.
🏳️⚧️ trans rights
Helloooo! ₍^. ̫.^₎
My name is Flori Ava Star (Fediverse link). I bark, meow, make other cool noises and have a big interest in distributed computing, decentralized networks, and the de-corpoification of the internet.
As a job I work at Famedly, where I write Rust and work with (and also on) Matrix. My current project there is writi** Unable to decrypt: The sender's device has not sent us the keys for this message. **.
Jokes aside, being very skeptical at first, I’ve learned that, actually, Matrix isn’t all that bad, and I’d really like to see a future where the ecosystem becomes a viable daily driver for non-nerds as well. If you feel like reaching out to me via Matrix, you can contact me at @flori_ava_star_weber:famedly.de. To reach me on Signal, you can use this link
Outside of work, I’ve been working on The polyproto federation protocol for about 2–2.5 years now in my free time, while hopelessly failing my computer science studies and then promptly dropping out. polyproto is my take on a federated, decentralized message exchange protocol.
Once it is ready, I’ll use it to try and write a viable alternative to Discord and Matrix.
🏳️⚧️ be gay, do crime!